The term “Agile” is not new in the IT field or other areas. No matter how big or small the project is, Agile is useful. It’s because the modern workplace is always changing and team members need to find better ways to work together on a variety of tasks. As a result of the success of agile methods, agile project management tools are getting better and better to meet the increasingly complex needs of businesses.
An Overview
In the fast-paced world of project management, agility is the name of the game. To keep up with the ever-changing demands and complexities of modern projects, professionals turn to agile project management tools. These tools are the backbone of efficient project planning, execution, and monitoring, allowing teams to adapt and thrive in dynamic environments.
What Is Agile Project Management?
Agile project management involves short-term sprints of software development based on client feedback.
Based on this core value, agile methodologies help teams adapt better to current market trends, improve collaboration between team members and stakeholders, and speed up the software-building process while reducing errors and bugs.
Agile management saves time and effort and eliminates risks, such as high expenses if a product doesn’t reach its target market segments. Therefore, Agile project management technologies help teams finish big, difficult projects smoothly.
The significance of Agile tools in modern project management
In the realm of modern project management, agile tools have become indispensable assets, playing a pivotal role in enhancing collaboration, efficiency, and overall project success. Understanding the significance of these tools is vital for anyone involved in project management.
Efficient Collaboration: Agile tools serve as centralized hubs where teams can collaborate seamlessly in real-time. This fosters transparency and eliminates communication gaps, ultimately boosting productivity and reducing misunderstandings.
Streamlined Workflows: With features like Kanban boards, sprint planning, and task tracking, agile tools empower teams to visualize their work, prioritize tasks, and manage project timelines effectively. They break down complex projects into manageable segments, ensuring smooth progress.
Improved Productivity: Agile tools automate routine tasks, provide templates for common project management activities, and offer integrations with other tools. This automation saves time and enables team members to focus on value-added work, resulting in increased productivity.
Enhanced Transparency: These tools provide a window into project progress, allowing stakeholders to monitor task statuses, identify bottlenecks, and make informed decisions. This transparency cultivates trust within the team and among stakeholders while promoting accountability.
Flexibility and Adaptability: Agile tools are designed to support iterative development and accommodate changing project requirements. They enable teams to respond promptly to customer feedback, market shifts, and emerging opportunities, ensuring the final product aligns with user expectations.
Data-Driven Insights: Agile tools capture valuable data on team performance, cycle times, and other metrics. This data becomes a powerful resource for identifying areas of improvement. By analyzing this data, teams can make data-driven decisions, optimize processes, and continuously enhance their performance.
What Can You Do With Agile Project Management Tools?
Agile management software helps team members manage a project from start to end date. With the full help of these management apps, you’ll do the following tasks:
- Include who will work on the project and a calendar of duties at each step or by importance.
- Keep an eye on how the project is going and find out if tasks are getting off track. Some powerful software may be able to change the schedule automatically when things don’t go as planned.
- Plan meetings so stakeholders’ demands can be swiftly updated, product quality can be guaranteed, and problems can be detected early.
- Make frequent reports so that management can keep track of how team members perform.
- Keep track of the budget and send direct invoices to clients for billable hours.
6 Best Agile Project Management Tools
All of the important metrics listed in the last section need to go with the powerful agile project management tools. It tackles three frequent problems: finishing the project on schedule and on budget, communicating, and reviewing. Based on these qualities, we can say the following about the top five choices:
1. Atlassian Jira + Agile
Atlassian Jira + Agile is always on the list of the best bug-tracking and agile management apps. The software lets companies work on their own servers or servers in the cloud. It was made to manage projects in many different industries. Other great things about it are:
- Using products like Gitlab and Slack along with Jira and Confluence.
- Providing Gantt charts, Scrum, Kanban boards, and other features to make workflows very customizable, find QA problems, and so on.
- Offering Stride as an alternative to Hipchat as a way to communicate.
- Using the release hub to see if the final product is finished before it is sent to the client.
Plus: The platform is very popular because it has a lot of add-ons for highly customizable project management, easy-to-use UI/UX design, mobile apps, and strong backlog management.
Minus: It’s sluggish to finish work, hard to learn, and hard to move between next-gen and classic projects.
Price: Atlassian Jira + Agile comes with a variety of price packages. There’s a free version for up to 10 users, $7 per user per month for up to 10,000.
2. Hubstaff Tasks
With Hubstaff Tasks‘s easy-to-use Kanban boards, it’s easy to organize tasks. With the Sprints feature, you can see all the tasks you’ve been given in one easy-to-access menu. For each project, you can make a custom workflow to make sure that tasks are always given to the right people. Hubstaff Tasks also has a Gantt chart view and daily standups, which are both ways to manage tasks.
Organizing tasks with Hubstaff Tasks is straightforward with its intuitive Kanban boards. With the Sprints feature, you’ll be able to see all the tasks assigned to you in one accessible menu. You can create custom workflows for different projects to ensure that tasks are always for the right people. Hubstaff Tasks also includes multiple task management elements, a Gantt chart view, and daily standups.
3. Active Collab
Active Collab is a system that is famous for being easy to use and affordable. It lets users work on a wide range of projects. It’s a great way to keep track of your projects and get things done because it has a lot of planning tools, email-based communication tools, and customizable calendars that users can share but that others can’t see.
Plus: The software gets rave reviews for its excellent dashboard, time tracking, milestone preview, task priority, and control as well as frequent updates.
Minus: It lacks Gantt charts and integration with Git and other variants of the control system.
Price: Free software is available for personal or professional use, but it’s only compatible with small projects with up to three people. Plus ($9 for three users per month) and Pro ($7 per user per month) are two other flexible plans.
4. TargetProcess
TargetProcess is a great tool for managing agile portfolios and projects. It was originally made for SAFe and similar frameworks for scaling agile. Its features work best for projects from medium-sized businesses or large corporations, no matter what kind of business they are. Some of the software’s best features are:
- Making it easier for you to see your data in charts and boards of any kind. At the same time, project statistics can be shown in different ways, such as by the number of items distributed in each iteration or by the number of tasks completed by each member.
- Having good tools for reporting on the performance and progress of many projects.
- Figuring out how different teams do their work.
Plus: The agile management app has a lot of ways to customize it and powerful features for both IT and non-IT projects, especially ones that use Agile/Agile Scrum methodologies.
Minus: TargetProcess has a slow and ugly user interface. Also, the price of the solution is thought to be pretty high.
Price: Prices for on-premise, private cloud, and venture versions are not listed.
5. Pivotal Tracker
This agile project management software helps software developers and new businesses with their many Scrum projects. Pivotal Tracker is easy to use and has an interface that is easy to understand. It also comes with a number of built-in features, such as
- Labeling to arrange and administer tasks.
- Members can join the conversation about your story by tagging them with @[name].
- Sharing files from your computers or Google Drive.
- Using REST API to build a set of integrations and tools.
- Increasing real-time communication around shared backlogs so that developers can see where they can improve and stakeholders can see how the work is going.
Plus: The platform has a number of tools for getting feedback and works with Zendesk, Jira, or Bugzilla.
Minus: Its mobile app has some problems, like crashing often on old versions of iOS or not letting you know when user stories have been updated.
Price: Up to 5 collaborators on 5 projects can use Pivotal Tracker for free. It also offers free basic plans for public projects, academic institutions, and non-profit organizations. Other plans include Startup ($10 per month for 6 to 10 members), Standard ($6.5 per user per month for 11 or more collaborators), and Enterprise (negotiated prices for an unlimited number of users).
6. SprintGround
SprintGround is a powerful tool for managing development projects. It was made with that in mind. In addition to bug and issue tracking tools, the platform helps you estimate releases automatically, lets the product owner track your release schedule, see what changes other members have made, and much more.
Plus: SprintGround is one of the best agile platforms for managing software projects that use Scrum, Kanban, or other linear methods.
Minus: No matter which pricing plan you choose, the software has limited file storage. Also, there are no desktop versions or mobile versions.
Price: The free version is offered to 3 users and 2 projects with 50MB storage. Other pricing packages entail Starter ($29/ month for 8 users and unlimited projects with 1GB), Business ($69/ month for 20 users and unlimited projects with 2GB), and Enterprise ($5.5 per user/ month for 21+ users and unlimited projects with 5GB). Those who want additional file storage have to pay $1/ GB/ month.
How to Choose the Best Project Management Apps?
If you want to choose the best agile project management tools, you should think about a few things before making a choice.
The first is your business’s important needs, which depend on how big your business is, how big the project is, how much money you have, and more. Because of this, software companies offer many different service plans to meet the different needs of your business, whether it’s a small business with a small budget or a large business with a lot of resources to manage at once.
Next, a good management platform should have standard ways to assign work, schedule project-based work, and keep track of work and costs at every stage of a product’s life cycle. Every management app should have Gantt charts, which are one of the most important tools for this. Users can look at a timeline to see how their tasks and workload fit into it.
There are a lot of collaboration apps out there right now, and you might confuse them for traditional agile management platforms. The first one takes the place of normal ways of talking, so it focuses on making people’s interactions as good as possible. The second one, on the other hand, has more information, like how to divide up tasks among team members or how to make quarterly reports on finances and progress. So, these apps could help with projects that are hard to do.
What Makes a Good Project Management Software?
When choosing agile project management tools, there are a lot of things to think about. A good platform is a big part of a project’s success, and making the wrong choice could lead to results you didn’t expect. The best management system should have the following functions, which should be linked to the whole project from the beginning to the end:
- Task lists: assign tasks and keep track of their progress so that everyone on the team knows how the project is going.
- Communication: helps people talk to each other electronically to avoid misunderstandings and speed up the process of solving problems or making decisions.
- Schedule: helps you see how a task fits into the whole project and how it’s going, as well as how long it might take to finish.
- File sharing: share and organize important files so you don’t have to spend time looking for them.
- Reporting: help team members and project managers get a clear picture of how well the work is going and figure out if any changes need to be made.
1. The Best Project Management Apps for Small Businesses
Costly agile management software with a lot of features isn’t the best choice for small businesses that only work on a few projects and don’t spend much time collecting timesheets to bill clients or comparing projects. Instead, they should look for ways to save money, like:
- GanttPRO ($8.9 per user/ month)
- Teamwork ($12 per user/ month)
- Zoho Projects ($5 per user/ month)
Limiting the budget to no more than $15 per person/ month is advisable for small teams with simpler projects.
2. The Best Project Management Apps for Large Organizations
A large agile software development company often deals with hundreds of projects and a massive number of software engineers, UI/UX designers, team leaders, and project managers at all levels. Therefore, the wide application of such complicated platforms as:
- LiquidPlanner (at least $29 per user/ month)
- Celoxis ($22.50 per user/ month)
Across projects is needed for tracking resources, estimating revenues, scheduling employees, and more if enterprises want to produce the best outcomes.
Conclusion
Agile project management tools are suitable for all kinds of businesses because they make it easier for team members to adapt to any project and help them see how the work is going or if there might be any QA problems. Even though different projects have different requirements, all management apps should have the same basic features: task lists, communication, file sharing, schedules, and reports. Also, any agile software development company should think about the project’s scope, budget, and human resources, among other things, before choosing a platform that meets those requirements. Designveloper hopes that this article will help you be a better leader of your team.
